"McCain has to "pretend" that his "heart" is in the hot-button issues of the religious right, "and he's not a good enough actor to pull it off."

I differ. McCain is a good enough actor. He always was; he still is. He has millions convinced he's a "maverick" and a "moderate" and a "straight-shootin' guy." Did you see him on Saturday Night Live? Have you ever seen him working the crowd? Have you ever seen him work the media? They eat out of his hand.

He *is* a good enough actor. He's been performing for years and the MSM has been buying his act. How hard is it to pull the wool over the average American's eyes? Can you say "swiftboat"? Americans will believe anything they half-hear while getting out of the shower as long as the MSM is pushing the meme.

If I have a part-time job on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday from 9AM -5PM, I can pick up a second job, either during my free weekdays, or on my weekends.

But if I have a job with this schedule one week

Monday 10 am - 2pm

Tuesday 2pm - 8pm

Wednesday 4pm -10

Thurdsday off

Friday 11am- 6pm

Saturday 10 am- 4pm

Sunday off

and my schedule for the next week is completely different from that one, then I can't hold a second job.

Which is exactly the point. Screwy schedules keep employees from taking second jobs, making them more beholden to the employer. It keeps people impoverished and frightened and uncertain. And really, what better workforce could a slimy, moneygrubbing mega-employer hope for than one it can intimidate and frighten?

As for the high numbers of employees quitting, that too is part of the plan. I learned this years ago when I worked in health care. Nurses were quitting after a few years work, and there were no experienced nurses to train new employees. We thought we should try to retain nurses. But no, that was not the plan. The plan was to PRETEND to retain nurses by offering ridiculous "bonuses" which came with all kinds of strings attached. Why? Because the hospitals WANTED nurses to leave. For the most part, new nurses were young. When they got married and had kids, they didn't feel as much loyalty to the hospital as single nurses did. They also started to use benefits after a few years - vacation time, sick time, maternity leave, health benefits. It behooved the hospitals if nurses spent about two and a half years at the hospital and then quit. Tons of money was saved in bennys, and the newer nurses weren't going to be around older, more experienced nurses who "knew too much" about the hospital and its administrative ways.

Now Walmart does not have to worry too much about benefit use by its employees, since most employees can't afford to buy into Walmart's health plan, but Walmart DOES benefit when there aren't too many experienced employees around who know the real score. Businesses today don't like for employees among the lower eschelon too know too much about how the business works - particularly about the lies they tell and the phony "rewards" dangled in front of their employees. And businesses don't trust their workers. They are afraid someone will figure out a new scam. So having employees leave is a GOOD thing, not a bad thing to mega-employers. It's been all the rage for years.

"What nursing and work at Wal-Mart DO have in common is that both are un-outsource-able"

I worked in a metropolitan area and we "outsourced" nursing jobs all the time. First, we sent our nurse recruiters to job fairs at colleges across the country -particularly rural areas - and recruited from there. Then there was the foreign market. Canada, Ireland, Scotland, Australia, the Philippines, Vietnam and China were a few places where our hospitals actively lobbied for work visas for nurses. Our hospitals printed up full color brochures promising city nightlife, beaches, tuition rembursment plans (which were damned harder to actually qualify for than the brochures would lead you to believe), etc. In rural areas, hospitals had different kinds of brochures printed up,usually offering good housing stipends. "Travelers" are another form of outsourcing. In the case of traveling nurses, there wasn't even the pretense of trying to retain anyone for any length of time. It was "work here for X number of weeks/months, get good pay, no benefits and cheap housing, then move on."

If you're paying top dollar - but no benefits - to a visitor who is leaving in 3 months, you don't have to pretend it's a decent place to work, or that you are going to make any improvements that will make the staff want to stay.

I predict this will be Walmart's next phase. The city of Orlando did this years ago. When they decided they wouldn't pay a decent living wage to the people who cleaned the hotels for the tourists who flocked there for Disneyworld, they imported Eastern Europeans to work for the equivalent of $880 a month with free lodging at the hotel (doubled and tripled up, of course, with other maids). The money was worth it for a single woman from Albania... a few months of $880 went a long way when they got home. But Americans couldn't afford to work there, pay rent (or a mortgage) and raise a family.